Infrastructure upgrade

[JorgeMartins]

Hi, I'm reaching to the community to assist me on a decision based on your experience.
We are using BP 6.10 and have a limited budget to upgrade the infrastructure (RAM and CPU) but only on a couple machines.
In order to increase BP's overall performance where should we focus the investment?
Runtime Resources, Application Server or SQL Server?

Thanks

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Jorge Martins
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[ewilson]

Hello @JorgeMartins,

I would say this really depends on the specific environment. Have you noticed any particular issues with the current infrastructure being able to complete the execution of processes within your defined SLAs? Have you noticed whether you're seeing any significant resource utilization peaks on any of the machines? Are you only considering RAM & CPU upgrades or are there other options for infrastructure upgrades to address network latency, etc? Have you considered whether that budget might be better spent on additional licenses to address more work in parallel?

Cheers,
Eric​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[JorgeMartins]

Hi @ewilson

First I must say that network issues are out of the equation. Our network is very good with latencies pretty close to zero.
​What I am proposing to management can be seen as an optimization of the infrastructure before the conclusion that we need more licenses.
All we can change at the moment is RAM & CPU.
The symptoms we see, on a daily base, are schedules being deferred. So, yes, we can say that processes are not being executed within the defined SLA.
We have a 16 GB, 4 Cores SQL Server, a 8 GB, 1 Core Application Server and 2x 8 GB, 4 Cores Runtime Resources.
At the end of the day we just wat to have more work done and it's not clear to me which machine should be boosted to increase the overall performance: SQL, Application Server or Runtime Resources?

Thanks
Jorge Martins

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Jorge Martins
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[Walter.Koller]

What do you mean with 'deferred schedules'? 
Is the start of the schedules delayed?
Or do processes need too much time to finish? Did you investigate why it takes so much time?

We have 8 Blue Prism server instances running, sharing:
1 SQL Server 16GB RAM, 4 Cores
1 App Server 32GB, 4 Cores
And both are pretty bored all the time while serving 30 runtime resources, some running >10h daily.

Our DB runs on a VM connected to a SSD storage system, so I/O is not an issue for us. This might be different for you depending on your infrastructure. But even with local HDD I cannot imagine 2 RR would generate any I/O bottleneck for you.
Regardless of I/O, you always should (must) maintain Blue Prism DB and keep it slim all the time, namely the logs and queues.
You might also consider reducing log level and minimize logging generally. This can positively affect performance of all components. 
(We had a case when a developer didn't turn off logging and a 3MB PDF file was recorded in the logs. There was no performance impact in Schedules but users noticed delays in BP when DB size reached a few 100GB)

For the runtime resources, try to remove all background applications and processes or synchronizations, if possible. Unfortunately we have to have background scans and syncs on our RR, which hugely reduces overall performance.

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Digital / Erste Group Bank
Europe/Vienna
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[ewilson]

@JorgeMartins,

I would suggest performing an analysis of the utilization of your DB and App servers as well as the runtime resources, if you haven't already. Ideally, you should be able to put together a trend line on CPU and RAM utilization.

Since you mentioned that the RR's aren't exactly meeting SLA's, I'd also suggest looking at the applications/platforms your processes are interacting with to see if they're causing any sort of bottleneck for the RR's.

If your focus is CPU/RAM, I'd say the utilization reports should give you a pretty good indication of where your investments would be best applied.

Cheers,

​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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[Tejaskumar_Darji]

To add, It should also be checked how the process and objects are designed inside studio.

Are there standards and best practices followed or not?
Are the BP codes efficient and straightforward or not?
Is proper exception handling used?

Sometimes it happens due to bad design and development bot unnecessarily consumes time and misses SLAs.

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If I was of assistance, please vote for it to be the "Best Answer".

Thanks & Regards,
Tejaskumar Darji
Sr. Consultant-Technical Lead
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